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Samsung Galaxy Beam Review

The Galaxy Beam is Samsung’s third projector phone but the first Android phone with this capability. It is available for purchase outside Asia, so US citizens can definitely start searching for it in mobile carrier stores. Find out more on Samsung Galaxy Beam review.

Display
This smartphone has a 3.7 inches multitouch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors, 480 x 800 pixels and about 252 ppi pixel density. It is made of scratch-resistant glass; it has projector UI and handwriting recognition.

Projector
The man who is behind this handset must be a genius as this projector is much more than a convenient smartphone for business travelers. Several applications including projecting images, hosting an impromptu movie night or beaming branding materials onto walls make this projector unique.
In addition, the bright projection bulb beams out 15 lumens, over passing any other previous attempts at projector phones that topped out at 10 lumens. The Texas Instruments-made DLP (digital light projector) can display images up to 50 inches wide at a 640×360-pixel resolution, while something called ambience mode can be set to play an image and song of your choice for minutes or hours. Everything is adjustable, the screen time-out, the brightness, the screen orientation, the flashlight, and so on.

Camera
Galaxy Beam’s 5-megapixel rear-facing camera allows the user to take some pretty good photos even in abundant light. The phone comes with an LED flash, so outdoors photos are better than indoor shots. You can set everything, from white balance, ISO, metering, to resolution. You can even set the camera to shoot portraits or landscapes, to shoot at night or to turn photos into negatives, grayscale, or sepia. There’s no continuous focus on the Galaxy Beam’s camera and you cannot access as many video settings, but you can still video record at 720p HD. You can film shorter videos or you can turn the camera on yourself for video taken out of the front-facing camera.

Features
The smartphone has 8GB of internal memory but it is 32GB expandable through a microSD card slot.
The battery life is very impressive, due to a 2,000mAh ticker, which provides 3 hours of solid beaming. The LED bulb in the projector itself has a life span of about 20,000 hours.
It runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread and packs the basics – a clock, a calendar, a calculator, and a music player, an FM radio, the standard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, mapping, search, and communication features for text, e-mail, and multimedia messaging, Google’s services including voice Navigation, Places, and YouTube.
The handset also has Swype as a virtual keyboard option and several apps such as AllShare for sharing content across DLNA devices, Kies Air for sharing content wirelessly between the computer and phone, ChatOn, a photo editor, Mini Diary, Polaris Office and Samsung hubs.

The bottom line
Though it doesn’t run on the latest version of Android, is thicker and heavier than many of today’s smartphones, has a weak software and its camera would need an update, the Samsung Galaxy Beam is a worthy standalone device. That’s because it comes at a fair price and it offers a bright projector that pushes boundaries.